I want to implement a series of services in the app server. One of the entry points I would like besides SOAP/HTTP is SOAP/JMS. I was thinking of using MDBs to interface with the JMS provider. However, once I have the SOAP message extracted if I implement the rest of the service outside of the container how can the communication between the components work.

If I want to use JMS am I forced to use session beans to implement the business logic of the service? Is there any reasonable way to take advantage of the MDB and yet not use the container for the rest of the business application?